Intelligent Cloud Services from the Basement

What is geekier than talking tech in the the basement? From Lyle’s workshop we discuss virtual assistants (Alexa & Google Assistant) and artificial intelligence. Why are smart people so worried about a pending robot apocalypse?

During the show Lyle argues that Brian should have given up on Apple iCloud contact syncing years ago. This article from Daniel Jalkut (MarsEdit developer) describes his own woes and how to recover your contacts.

Police in Bentonville, Ark., asked Amazon for audio and other records from an Echo digital assistant in the home of James Andrew Bates after Victor Collins was found dead in Bates’ hot tub last year, The Information reported Tuesday.

Ben Thompson writes about technology, business and strategy. He is always insightful. Although most posts require a subscription, this free post outlines why Alexa is in a good position to be voice assistant to succeed.

In this episode of the Waking Up podcast, Sam Harris speaks with Garry Kasparov about the problem of waning American power, the rise of Putin, the coming presidency of Donald Trump, computer chess, the future of artificial intelligence, and other topics.

Observe that in these scenarios the AIs are evil by default, just like a plant on an alien planet would probably be poisonous by default. Without careful tuning, there’s no reason that an AI’s motivations or values would resemble ours.

For an artificial mind to have anything resembling a human value system, the argument goes, we have to bake those beliefs into the design.

AI alarmists are fond of the paper clip maximizer, a notional computer that runs a paper clip factory, becomes sentient, recursively self-improves to Godlike powers, and then devotes all its energy to filling the universe with paper clips.

The computing system then ranked the nearly 1,500 genes in the human genome and predicted which could be associated with ALS. Barrow’s research team examined Watson’s predictions, and found that eight of the 10 genes proposed by the computer were linked to the disease. Of those, five had never before been associated with ALS.

NVIDIA Research has demonstrated a method of foveated rendering which the company says is nearly invisible to users. Researchers behind the new approach say the method can drastically reduce rendering workload, allowing for more detailed virtual reality scenes.